If you give your team a reasonable amount of time to accomplish a reasonable goal, you will make reasonable progress. But your competition is doing that, and you are just keeping up.
What if you gave your team an unreasonable stretch goal? What if you gave them an unreasonably short time to do it in? Instead of saying the goal is 10% improvement, what if it was 3x improvement?
Some employees will mentally check out. But some will stick it out; and sometimes, you will get the unreasonable progress accomplished. Even if you don’t, you are likely to get a lot farther by trying for exponential improvement rather than incremental progress.
Don’t just let crazy things come out of your mouth casually, lest you lose credibility. Be fully committed yourself, and get behind the team 100%.
What do you need to improve exponentially?
We gave our management team a goal of 33% growth this year! No one balked or complained! They just advise on how they can reach their goals!
always do more than expect, always set up goals out of immediate reach, and you leave your competition in the dust.
What good is it to have goals you can actually achieve and bypass?
“Aim passed the goal someone told me once :-)”